Watch Out for the Bricks
by Gabriel Ice
Summary: Pauline has been kidnapped, and Mario must overcome his tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents in order to save her.


Watch Out for the Bricks

The image of the monkey taking Pauline away was still fresh in my mind. It was right in the middle of a romantic picnic. I was just about to slice open the pumpkin pie when one of the more ominous shadows I'd ever seen fell over our little picnic blanket and engulfed the cheery mood. I lost my appetite completely when the ape lifted my beloved over his shoulder and carried her off to the construction site. He didn't even acknowledge me. He didn't even look at me. His attention was riveted to Pauline. The last thing I heard before the ape and his victim went out of earshot was a helpless cry from Pauline: "Get your hands off me, you darn dirty ape!"

Luckily for Pauline, I was the persistent type. Sure, I spent a minute or so dazed enough that I didn't even notice the pigeons landing on my head until one of them pecked me hard enough to knock some sense back into me, but from then on, I knew just what I had to do; I had to rescue Pauline. I knew I was smarter than some stupid monkey. Much smarter, I hoped. I had read enough about what intelligence can be found in non-human species to know that ape smarts get vastly overblown by the popular opinion. Apes can't even talk, no matter how many people believe (wrongly) that they can learn sign language. No, those gorillas that learn a few signs are just conditioned to make certain hand movements to get themselves fed or cuddled or whatever. They look a lot smarter than they are because they have such great manual dexterity and good enough memories to learn a lot of signs. It's no wonder the ability of humans' ape-like ancestors to use their hands so well led to humans getting smarter. Still, the gorillas don't know even rudimentary grammar, and they can't come up with new things to say, and they basically don't show any signs of comprehending what linguists would insist makes up an actual factual language. Of course, the gorilla trainers don't go out of their way to publicize any of that. If they did, they couldn't get interviews for their animals, and they'd lose a bunch of money. Alas.

So I knew I wasn't dealing with any brilliant criminal mastermind. I wasn't even dealing with something as clever as a run-of-the-mill thief or kidnapper. I was just chasing a dumb animal who had nabbed my girlfriend. In retrospect, maybe I should have called a zookeeper.

It didn't take much looking around for me to see that the stupid monkey had climbed up the scaffolding of a work-in-progress new office building. He stood at the summit, beating his chest, growling (at me?), and throwing any stray objects he could find over the side. Occasionally, he'd stomp his feet enough to bend the girders. That, I discovered, was going to be a problem for me.

See, my idea, brave and stupid as it was, entailed single-handedly scaling the building and slipping Pauline away right from under the monkey's nose. Hey, I didn't exactly have a lot of time for thinking up anything more creative, and any dilly dallying might have led to Pauline herself getting tossed over the side. I couldn't afford to take a chance like that. Unfortunately, the newly bent girders made a perfect path for dangerous rolling objects. In particular, I had to deal with barrels. Yes, the monkey was throwing barrels at me.

I was an athlete in college, though. I ran track and field, and though I was by no means a star, I could still handle the hurdles with the greatest of ease. These barrels, then, became like fast moving hurdles that would kill me if I didn't manage to clear them. The going was tough, but at least early on I could observe the barrels as they made their way toward me to help me time my leaps. Pauline must have been pleased at my agility and courage in jumping my way to her freedom. I felt like I was scoring mad points each time I cleared one.

Things got a little hairier (if you'll pardon the pun) when the barrels the stupid monkey threw landed in the mouth of a larger metal barrel, whose contents were for whatever reason on fire. A few hits later and the metal barrel tipped over. The fire then spread. Ah, life is such an unpredictable thing, isn't it? Within the space of a few minutes, I had gone from a lovely picnic with my girlfriend to scurrying up a damaged construction site to get away from a fire while dodging barrels hurled at me by a temperamental kidnapper monkey. At that moment, I decided that God must have bipolar disorder.

I felt the muscles in my legs starting to tense up. There is only so much pressure a man can take before he makes a mistake somewhere and, in situations like the one I was in, winds up dead. I'm almost positive that would have happened to me if it weren't for a flash of inspiration that hit me just before a barrel did the same. Some fortuitously absentminded construction worker had left his toolkit lying up on one of the girders. The particular girder was the one to which I had managed to climb up to that point. In what was probably the best move I had made in my life other than buying those shares of Microsoft stock back in the '80s, I dumped the toolbox onto what passed for the floor and snatched up the largest, most violent tool I could find at such short notice: a hammer.

The hammer was enough to turn the tide of the struggle in my favor. I had never before seen such craftmanship in a mere tool, nor had I seen such enormous size. It would have been poorly suited to the job of pounding nails into surfaces, but it was more than adequate for my purpose, which was to defend myself from the onslaught of barrels. Feeling more than a little bit like Gallagher, I took a swing at the first barrel to venture within range of the head of my new hammer and watched with a satisfied yet deadly serious smile as the wooden barrel shattered into dozens of pieces. Surely my ingenuity would score me even more points with Pauline when I finally got to her.

Which was, of course, looking more and more likely. The barrels, which only moments before had been threatening my life, became nothing more than a nuisance. They reminded me of the blockhead who had been the terror of my elementary school class, only to find himself the butt of everyone else's jokes when they all hit growth spurts and he spent the rest of his secondary education at five foot three, pining for the days of yore and dreaming of what might have been had he only eaten his veggies. For a split second, I caught myself feeling sorry for the barrels.

Then the monkey surprised me by running out of barrels. Thinking I could find something other than rolling wooden cylinders to smash, perhaps something more simian, I kept hold of my hammer as I further ascended the skeletal proto-building. Within seconds I knew I would have the monkey at my mercy. I'd smash that hideously self-satisfied grin off his ugly face, I'd take Pauline home, and I'd try not to blush as she smothered me in kisses. Everything would be alright, I thought. What I didn't count on was that the monkey would find something else to throw.

To this day, I cannot figure out how I overlooked the pile of bricks resting on the top girder. The monkey certainly knew about them, and he eventually found a use for them. Actually, it's not so much that he found a use as that he did what he did with just about everything else: he threw them. At me. Were his aim slightly better, I might have been in mortal peril, and as things were, I was still in danger of having a stray one accidentally put a dent in my skull, but I wasn't about to give up. I told myself that Rome wasn't built in a day, and even the tallest building is put together one brick at a time, and then I chided myself for trying to draw comfort from the objects that were then threatening my life.

Pressing on, I made it to the second to last girder from the top. Unfortunately for me and for Pauline, the nearer I got to the monkey, the bigger target I made, and I found myself having to duck behind a sheet of metal to keep away from an especially nasty barrage of monkey-thrown projectiles. I began to panic, worried that I'd come so close to the top only to fail, done in by a creature only slightly smarter than my obnoxious brother Luigi and twice as ugly. I noticed that I was sweating profusely.

Still lost in self-pity, I never even felt any pain when a brick sailed over the top of the metal shield and conked me upside the head. I just noticed the world starting to spin. Having no contingency plan for something like that, I obeyed my suddenly very poor sense of balance and fell forward onto my face. For a few seconds, I didn't even realize what had happened. I couldn't remember why I was climbing a partially built tower. I couldn't even remember if I was a carpenter or a plumber. I was lost.

And when I get nervous, I get hungry. Most people who see me tell me I'm a little pudgy, but I know they're just being polite. I'm probably the fattest man ever to wear overalls. Perhaps that's exaggerating somewhat, but I'm no Kate Moss. I love my food. It comforts me in times of trouble. Trouble, like when I'm seven stories up, facing down an angry monkey and trying to remember the medical definition of a concussion. And I had nothing to eat. Something had to be done. Out of desperation, I reached out for the softest object I could find, which turned out to be a mushroom growing underneath my metal shelter. It didn't occur to me that it was strange that a mushroom should be growing there.

My gluttony saved my life. In fact, it turned it around in a way no one could have predicted. The second I snarfed down my mushroom snack, I felt full of energy. I felt myself becoming the kind of lively young man who could stare down a dozen monkeys even if they were being guarded by a charging rhino, an elephant who never forgets to kill, and a pool of sharks with laser beams on their heads. Laser beam guns. Something like that. In short, I felt super. Then I began to grow.

My whole body expanded until I was about twelve feet tall. I would have expected to feel weak and sickly after turning into a giant like that. I know that muscle strength increases with the square of the height, while total mass increases proportionally to the cube, so rather than feeling super, I should have felt like I needed some treatment for major back pain. It's all for the same reason ants can lift fifty times their body weight; it's not that ants are strong at all, but rather that ants are really tiny, so fifty times their body weight is also really tiny. No matter what all of the children's books said, human-sized ants would not be able to lift fifty times their human-sized weight; they would collapse on the floor and find themselves unable to move. However, there must have been something magical about the mushrooms growing on that building, because I felt more like the building (and the monkey) shrank than like I grew. I felt normal but huge. I knew the world hadn't suddenly become small because I didn't feel any lighter, but then, had I grown bigger without losing any of my relative strength, would I not feel lighter because I was in fact heavier yet balanced out by a smaller world? Probably not, since that would still leave the problem of either feeling light or having difficulty moving. I still haven't figured out the physics of the situation, and I didn't even want to attempt the biochemistry of it. A twelve-foot-tall me would have to eat a ridiculous amount of food to keep up with all the energy required just to go for a walk. The further removed I become from the events that happened that day, the more I think about these things and the more of a headache I get. My current view is that it was all magic and therefore was not subject to any laws of physics at all. Still, I don't even like that view, because I don't believe in magic and because falling back on calling something magic is just the lazy way of saying you don't have the correct explanation yet.

In any case, I found myself strong and agile and more than a match for any stupid monkey in hand to hand combat. I didn't even feel dizzy anymore. I also could barely feel the bricks being thrown at me. Letting out the fiercest growl I could muster (and aided by my expanded windpipe, which put every sound coming out of my mouth at a lower frequency than its pre-magic mushroom analog), a leaped up to the top floor, charged the ape, and shoved all pity aside as I scared the thing into jumping over the side and landing in the back of a passing garbage truck. Seriously, folks, what were the chances of a garbage truck passing just then? But I digress.

I took Pauline up in my arms and carried her down to safety on the ground below. Was I romantic or what? I saved the day, and I carried the beautiful damsel-in-distress back to the realm of the happy and healthy and sane. I might as well have been wearing sparkly silver armor instead of my usual worn but tough faded overalls and red shirt. I had never felt so alive.

And then came the worst moment of the day. "Honey," said Pauline, "I think we should see other people."

I was agog. I was aghast. What was this?

"You're breaking up with me?" I asked incredulously.

"I have to."

"Why?"

"You know I'm sensitive about my height. I just can't date someone as tall as you are."

With those words, she really made a monkey out of me.


End file.
